The Photograph That Started Everything
I wasn’t looking for a book. I was looking for a photograph.
Every biography leaves things on the cutting room floor, a document found too late, a family memory that surfaced after the manuscript was already in print, a thread of history still being pulled. This is where those pieces live: research notes, reflections, and the ongoing story of bringing back into the light one man's forgotten courage.
New reflections, research, and rediscovered history, added as the story keeps unfolding.
I wasn’t looking for a book. I was looking for a photograph.
There is a particular kind of silence in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. It’s not peaceful. It’s heavy, the silence of thousands of boxes containing thousands of decisions that mattered enormously to somebody, once, and now sit waiting for someone to care enough to open them.
There’s a moment in this research that changes everything, and it isn’t a document. It’s a conversation.
The blog tells the story behind the story. For the whole account of Myles Standish's year in Marseille, the risk, the rescue, and everything it cost him, start with the book.
"I picked this up expecting a history lesson and got something closer to a gut-punch. By chapter three I'd forgotten I was reading nonfiction; I just wanted to know what happened to the people in that line."
owner
"What got me wasn't the heroism, it was the cost. This isn't a book about a man who did the right thing easily. It's about what it took out of him to do it at all."
owner
"I've read a lot of WWII history, and I'd never heard Myles Standish's name before this book. That alone tells you something. It shouldn't have taken this long for his story to surface."
owner